Η Βοσκοπούλα [The shepherdess]

The anonymous narrative poem Η Βοσκοπούλα [The shepherdess] is one of the most important works of early modern Greek literature. Written in Crete around 1580-1600, in rhyming couplets of eleven-syllable verse, it was first printed in Venice in 1627 and was re-issued in numerous popular editions until the 19th century. It belongs to the genre of pastoral poetry, taking its story and characters from the world of shepherds and stockbreeders, while at the same time it suggests a meditation on love and gender relations, on the randomness of human fortunes, on death and loss. Behind its lyricism, initially carefree but ultimately tragic, we are confronted with the impossibility of flight from reality, even in an idyllic, "Arcadian" countryside.

The present editor, Alfred Vincent, is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the University of Sydney. He has prepared a user-friendly edition, which does not aim to restore a lost archetypal text, but instead offers a version more similar in character to the first Venetian edition and its reprints, though without their numerous printing errors. The aim is to reproduce, as far as is practical, something closer to the experience of the countless Greek speakers who read the Shepherdess, or heard it read, from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and were moved by its poetry and its story. The Appendix contains a selection of Greek oral versions of the Shepherdess and examples of western and Greek pastoral literature, in translation where necessary, from the Hellenistic period up to the 19th century.